On Friday night, a remarkable young man named Jaime Gonzalez graduates with a master's in public health from USC's Keck School of Medicine.

He'll walk to the graduation ceremony with his parents from the tiny South Central L.A. apartment he grew up in - only five minutes from the USC campus.

It's the same walk his mother took him on thousands of time when he was a small boy - willing her son to take just one more slow, painful step, then another. Please, baby, you can do it, she would plead.

And, he did.

When he was born 29 years ago, the doctors told Trinidad and Alicia Gonzalez that Jaime's physical birth defects were so serious he'd probably never see his first birthday.

When he proved them wrong they said buy him a wheelchair because he'd never walk, even with the countless surgeries he'd need on his severely deformed legs and feet.

Jaime walked. Not great and never fast, but he walked.

While his father pulled double shifts as a sample-cutter in the garment district downtown, Alicia worked part time as a school cafeteria worker.

After she washed the lunch dishes, she'd rush home and help her son on those slow, painful walks to his daily physical therapy sessions a few blocks from the USC campus where the young doctor graduates on Friday night with a master's in public health.

Next week he leaves to take his first job as Dr. Jaime Gonzalez, caring for the children of migrant field workers in a Salinas family health clinic.

He wanted to be a surgeon and perform operations like those performed on him so many times. But he knew he couldn't stand over an operating table that long. And he knew he could never move quickly enough when the call came to move it, doc, STAT. We've got an emergency.

"I'd see him struggling to get across campus to be on time for his next class, and think what an incredible kid," says Dr. Erin Quinn, former associate dean for admissions and educational affairs for the Keck School of Medicine.

She's seen hundreds of outstanding young men and women come through this prestigious school of medicine, but none quite like Jaime Gonzalez.

"He has a resilience and inner strength I've rarely seen," says Quinn, who now runs a community-based, multi-specialty residency program in Ventura. "I'm so proud of him. He's going to be one terrific doctor."

Jamie's become used to people being deceived by his looks, but not after they get to know him. He sure impressed me the first time I met him in 2002 when he was graduating with honors from Reseda High School.

When I wrote a book in 2011 of favorite columns over 25 years - "Here's to the Winners" - there was never any doubt Jaime would be featured prominently because he defined winner.

He went from being the kid on campus everyone averted their eyes from because they felt sorry for him to becoming one of the most popular kids on campus. And, he had brains. Every prestigious university in the country wanted him.

But it was the neighborhood university he saw every day on those slow, painful walks to physical therapy with his mom that was lucky enough to land him.

If he couldn't physically be a surgeon, he wanted to be the doctor who worked with the poor and families just getting by - families like his own. It took a personal tragedy to realize it.

"In my second year of pre-med my mom was shot in the waist in a drive by shooting one night while she was taking out the trash," Jaime says. "By then I was living five minutes away on campus.

"I couldn't concentrate on school with my mother in the hospital. How could I? She was the reason I was here. She taught me there is no such thing as an obstacle, that my disabilities could help me be strong, and they have."

It would set him back a year of medical school, but Jamie was there for his mother through two operations, just as she had been there for his countless operations as a child.

His parents still live in the same apartment, still work the same jobs. His younger brother, Antonio, an industrial engineer, is also a USC graduate.

Jaime says he wants to hang up his shingle in the old neighborhood one day.

He knows the families living on these streets could use some quality health care, and he wants to give them.